ChatGPT didn’t write this column (although it helped me get my column down to the required length). But thanks to ChatGPT (and Claude.ai), I can finally tick a major item off our firm’s marketing to-do list.
We’re more than two years into the generative artificial intelligence (AI) era, which has become a society-altering communication phenomenon, like the telephone in the 19th century and TV and the internet in the 20th.
I often lecture lawyers on generative AI, covering drafting, legal analysis, research, ethics and training. I advise exploring low-risk tasks first, like marketing, before taking on complex projects.
Marketing is a low-risk use case for generative AI. While risks like violating advertising rules exist, lawyers are already using AI to save time and accomplish tasks previously outsourced.
So how did it save the day at our firm? As many who have read this column know, I’m a practicing immigration lawyer (in addition to a founder of a company that makes generative AI tools for lawyers). In 2023, my partners started discussing expanding our immigration practice from one that strictly focused on U.S. work to a global migration practice. Our firm has always informally dealt with these queries by steering those matters to overseas firms we have had referral relationships with other the years.
We were hearing from our corporate clients, however, that they prefer one-stop shopping where their primary immigration firm would manage all their work and not just the inbound U.S. work. We would still be working with local immigration lawyers doing the substantive work, but we would play an active role overseeing the matters including screening counsel, using our technology to collect information, store documents, communicate with our clients, etc. and centralize billing.
Other factors were also at play in leading us to want to build out our immigration work. COVID had made remote work common, and this also meant that Americans could work from anywhere in the world. This coincided with a trend of many countries creating “digital nomad” visas. More people were approaching us about referrals to lawyers who could help them claim citizenship by descent in countries where they had family ties. Retirement abroad has become more common. And, of course, we started hearing from people worried about the U.S. election. That included people worried about the direction the country might take. And it included immigrants who suddenly became concerned that their long-term plans in the United States may no longer work.
The question was how to start creating this new practice. We wanted to build a fleshed-out business and marketing plan for the new practice area. But we couldn’t get it moving. That’s where ChatGPT came into play. We started with this query:
Greg: I would like to develop a business plan for a new area of practice for our immigration law firm. We are a US immigration law firm, but many of our US corporate clients send people to other countries. We traditionally have referred that work to lawyers in other countries, but our clients are telling us they would like us to manage that work even if we work with local lawyers to perform the legal work. Basically, we will supervise the outside providers and allow our clients to send us this additional work using the systems we have in place to collect information from them and to keep them informed. I'd like you to ask me a question at a time and then assemble a plan after that that will outline how the services will be provided and marketed.
Chat GPT: Great, Greg! Let's start by defining the scope of services.
- What specific outbound immigration services would you like to offer (e.g., visas, work permits, residency permits, compliance checks)?
- Are there specific countries or regions you want to focus on initially, or will the service be global from the start?
Greg: We will be focusing on visas, work permits, and residency permits. We will be global from the start. I forgot to mention that I have a very extensive network of lawyers in other countries.
The prompt here is important because I wanted to go into a lot more depth than you typically can do with a single request like “write me a business plan.” You may have noticed that you really can’t get more than a couple of pages in an answer to any question you give ChatGPT. I wanted to build out a much deeper-level document by asking a series of questions.
ChatGPT has combed the entire internet in its training which means it has ingested a massive number of business plans, business books and other materials that would be relevant to the conversation. Using the interview approach where I was asked a variety of follow-up questions essentially made the conversation much like talking to a really good consultant. A sampling of the follow-up questions includes
ChatGPT gave me a skeletal outline of a business plan after that. But I also used all of this initial feedback to start asking a number of additional questions including brainstorming on additional types of clients who would be interested in global immigration services, what a global immigration client portal might look like and how to shop for a vendor to build that, how to standardize the vetting of outside immigration counsel and building out a greatly expanded marketing strategy. We worked on pulling all this material together, making our edits and our own contributions and then created the 20-page business plan that closely matched what we were needing.
I mentioned before that Anthropic’s Claude.ai helped as well. We wanted to build out a section of our website that would showcase this new practice area. I fed Claude our new business plan and asked it to develop an outline of what this part of our website would look like. Then I asked it to help mock up a website and it was able to generate HTML code and show me a preview of what each web page would look like (including generating website copy based on our business plan). We were then able to take this to our web design firm, which can now create this new section of our website much more quickly and closer to our expectations than we might have gotten otherwise.
A lot of people have heard about the “blank page” problem with starting a complicated new writing project. That’s essentially what we were facing. Was the AI perfect? Of course not. But it also helped us create a far better plan than we would have gotten if the task were strictly human driven. And, more importantly, we got the project finished and it’s not entirely clear to me that would have been the case without this assistance.
